Ben Shapiro Torches Tucker Carlson for ‘Bizarre and Twisted’ Attacks While Doing ‘Propaganda Work’ for Qatar

The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro torched Tucker Carlson on Monday over the latter’s “bizarre and twisted” attacks on “neocons,” while also knocking the far-right commentator for “doing a bit of propaganda work” for the Qatari government.

After noting that minorities in Syria are suffering under the new regime that supplanted longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad, Shapiro pointed out that while Assad may have been marginally better for them, he was hardly their savior.

“The attempt to turn this, however, into a story about the evils of the West, as opposed to Assad being an evil dictator, who was replaced by people who are completely evil in a different direction. If your sort of bizarre supposition is that this is because of America as opposed to because the Middle East happens to be a long chain of terrorist tyrannies, following one another with different enemies, I don’t think that you’ve been following Middle Eastern history very long,” began Shapiro.

“Now, Tucker Carlson has been on tour in the Middle East. He was over, hanging out with the leader of Qatar,” he continued before reading the following tweet from Carlson out loud, which he mocked at various points:

As predictable as this is, it’s still infuriating to see it. For decades, Bashar al-Assad protected minority religious communities in Syria, including the country’s large Christian population. No one in the United States was allowed to notice this, and anyone who did was immediately denounced by neocons as a dangerous extremist. Bari Weiss declared Tulsi Gabbard “monstrous” and an “Assad toady” for noticing.

But it was true. Assad protected the Christians. The weaker Assad was, the more Christians died. During the years that neocons in the west backed the war against Assad, the percentage of Christians in Syria went from ten percent to two percent. Now that Assad has been driven from power, many of the remaining Syrian Christians are being slaughtered and their holy places desecrated.

Bari Weiss and John Bolton haven’t said a word about it. But no one who’s paying attention can be surprised it’s happening. Neocon projects in the Middle East invariably destroy ancient Christian communities, from Iraq to Gaza and in many places in between. Can this be an accident? You wonder.

“This is a bizarre and twisted reading of history, at best. I’m not going to attribute motives, because that’s not something that I like to do. I will say that this is so ahistorical, the idea that chaos in the Middle East has not targeted Christians is ignorant of literally all Christian history in the Middle East,” submitted Shapiro.

“The notion that Christians have generally been targeted by neocons in the West in the Middle East is a complete reversal of how history actually has worked in this area. I have suspicions as to what Tucker means by quote, unquote ‘neocons,’ but again, the idea that Christians, who can live safely in the Middle East, by the way, in about one country, which is Israel,” he argued. “Not a lot of Christians who are living safely in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Saudi. These are not places with large Christian populations. Many of these places are places that Tucker is busy defending this week.”

He continued:

That what’s going on in Syria — which is a horror show — is not the fault of the Turks, who are literally backing the regime that is murdering people, including Christians. It’s somehow the fault of the neocon warmongers — it’s a wild supposition. But again, this is part and parcel of some of the stuff that Tucker seems to be pushing lately, which again is the idea that all conflict in the Middle East is the fault of an evil cadre of Americans who are pushing conflict in the Middle East. No one in the Middle East has any agency. Iran has no agency. Hezbollah has no agency. Qatar certainly has no agency.

Shapiro went on to criticize Carlson for “doing a bit of propaganda work on behalf of the Qatari regime” and promulgating a worldview in which the United States and Israel are at “fault” for “everything bad that happens in the Middle East.”

Shapiro and Carlson have previously traded shots over their respective positions on America’s role in the Middle East. After Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023, Carlson accused Shapiro of not caring “about the country [the U.S.] at all” and hosted anti-Semitic commentator Candace Owens — then of The Daily Wire — for a fawning interview amidst a feud between Owens and Shapiro. Shapiro, meanwhile, has accused Carlson of “lying” about him and having an “ugly” view of the war between Israel and Hamas.